Exterminator City (2005)

To call this flick a horror movie would be a travesty against horror, it’s a low budget piece of boob-based farce nonsense. The director has no distinguishable pedigree but has clearly been raised on a steady diet of Charles Band, Jim Wynorski and Fred Olen Ray without their wealth of experience. Everything about this production screams shitty movie, but really it is actually quite enjoyable once you get past its many flaws.

The plot, or what could pass for it, seems to explore the potential future of a world with only melon chested scream queens, porn actresses and sentient robots. Basically, an extermination robot gone rogue is picking off topless women for no real reason, while being pursued by a jaded Robocop. The killer bot, whose face resembles that of Arnie’s T101 without the chiselled chin and forehead, uses various implements to hack, slash and bludgeon the seemingly endless number of chesty stars.

Between titles sequence and credits, there are issues aplenty: The bots and ladies don’t ever share screentime, all the death scenes are created through pretty shitty editing meaning that all the kills look a bit like poorly realised scenes from Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho. These actresses are pretty poor at the best of times, so giving them nothing to act against or react to reduce their performances to lame screams directly into the camera, with added giggles and looks of confusion. The constant religious imagery does nothing but confuse and confound the audience, I watched intently for the full 80 minutes and didn’t really understand what was going on. Did the killer robot want to be human? Was it supposed to funny? Perhaps the biggest disappointment comes from the fact that the stellar collection of fronty babes are criminally underused, just thirty seconds of boob rubbing, ten seconds of screaming, repeat.

Voiced by gravel gargling noir enthusiast, the robots are fairly well realised for a micro budget feature, although tending more towards Tom Servo than Toyota innovation, the killer droid can be pretty damn creepy. The acting is dog shit all over but the death scenes are inventive if stunted by the editing. Portions of the writing could have been golden in the mouths of decent actors as apposed to puppetbots, the external sets were pretty decent looking too. Some people may think there is more to life than seeing Brinke Stevens get bazooka’d in the face by a robot puppet or a giant boobed dominatrix get chainsawed to death, these people probably need to lighten the hell up.

It’s not a great film, and it is never going to inspire anything other than a quick one off the wrist, but it is directed with such unabashed gusto that it’s almost impossible to deride. I have high hopes for Clive Cohen, perhaps in the future he could eek out a niche similar to that of his American counterparts.